Posted
by
timothy
on Wednesday January 20, 2010 @04:51PM
from the find-waldo-win-a-shuttle-main-engine dept.

tedlistens writes "NASA is asking the public to suggest subjects for the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE, its super powerful camera currently orbiting Mars. Since it arrived there in 2006, the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has seen more success than that lost lander, recording nearly 13,000 observations of Martian terrain, with each image covering dozens of square miles and revealing details as small as a desk. By letting the public in on the Martian photo shoot, scientists aren't just getting more people excited about space exploration. They're hoping that crowdsourcing imaging targets will increase the camera's already bountiful science return. Despite the thousands of pictures already taken, less than 1 percent of the Martian surface has been imaged."

The actual conspiracy theory is that we did indeed send men to the moon (Armstrong, Aldrin, et al). However, what we found there indicated the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations, either artifacts or real living beings. This information was immediately classified at the highest levels. The photographic evidence of men on the moon was faked not because we didn't really go there, but because we found things there that NASA decided the public could not handle knowing.

That's how the conspiracy theory goes. So, finding that the moon lander is there neither proves nor disproves it. It would be evidence, but evidence of what?

Wouldn't the lander be near the stuff we weren't supposed to be shown?

Moon hoaxers can't agree on which part of the whole thing was faked. With tens of thousands of scientists and engineers working on the project, I just can't really see how you could even conceivably not go to the moon. If I were writing a conspiracy script, what you're saying at least makes a wee bit of sense -- we got there and saw something bad and don't want to show our real vacation slides. But there's people who don't even believe th

They need to send one of these up around the moon and prove the moon lander is there.

I'm not sure how that's supposed to be better evidence than the presence of mirrors for laser range-finding placed there by the astronauts that a variety of institutions around the world have used to measure the earth-moon distance (and of course in the process verifying their presence) would be.

I don't know would be more annoying - finding out its faked or seeing conspiracy theorists reject it as evidence.

Annoying? If the probe provided evidence that the landings were "faked", meaning we could no longer see the landers that the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imaged only months ago [nasa.gov] that wouldn't be annoying. It'd be one of the most baffling mysteries in modern history!

The question wouldn't be "does this mean we never landed on the moon?", it'd be "who landed on the moon without telling anyone and stole the fucking landers?!"

Oh and obviously if the conspiracy theorists are not satisfied with the existing evidence, they will never be satisfied, because they simply don't want to be satisfied.

Annoying? If the probe provided evidence that the landings were "faked", meaning we could no longer see the landers that the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imaged only months ago [nasa.gov] that wouldn't be annoying. It'd be one of the most baffling mysteries in modern history!

The question wouldn't be "does this mean we never landed on the moon?", it'd be "who landed on the moon without telling anyone and stole the fucking landers?!"

Brennan. He does [wikipedia.org] things like that. All he needs to have had done will be to w

Is it really all that useful having 100,000 people with zero technical experience or knowledge looking at these pictures?We might be able to identify gross features, but the nuances will be glossed over entirely.

But if it doesn't require any technical knowledge, NASA should start pumping out lesson plans and get school kids do the bulk of the dirty work.

Finding craters is easy all you have to do if find circles in the pictures, and I very much doubt the NASA only goes on the work of the public. Mapping all you have to do in line up a picture on a larger picture, I know real technical, but it may be to hard for you. Finding circle and matching patterns, how much experience do you need?
You know people with zero technical experience find stuff on google maps all the time.

There's a similar thing going on for some time on ESA Mars Express mission, where public is invited to participate in obtaining, processing, etc. of images taken with a camera that was meant originally to observe Beagle separation.

Well, yes and no. Is 30 cm/pixel higher resolution then the "webcam" on Mars Express? (ignoring for a minute the latter is not a proper scientific instrument) Certainly.

But is it better? For many things - of course. But not for some other. It doesn't give view of the whole planet, or large part of it, in one shot (the summary says MRO hasn't covered even 1% yet). So there is still potential to discover something very interesting.

Most importantly, from the perspective or side of Mars which isn't visible from

13,000 pictures of the surface of mars, and still no clear photos of the aliens. It's a coverup I tell you. The government doesn't want us to know the truth [iwatchstuff.com]! They're hiding it [iwatchstuff.com] until they can take these natural resources for themselves [interviewmagazine.com]. It's the man taking away from us what rightfully belongs to all of us! If you let them get their way, well, just be left with these [thesun.co.uk].

Why not buy a rocket, round up Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh, put them in it, blast it off towards Mars, and have it crash land, scattering their corpses' body parts across the Martian plains, and take a picture of that. I bet I could find quite a few people that would pay good money to see that,...

The Phoenix Lander was extremely successful. It found exactly what it was sent to look for. I don't know any better definition of success that that. It was never designed to survive the winter... they are just looking to see if somehow it did. The writer should be a little less cavalier.

Agreed, and why the downmod for the AC? He has a point, referring to the Phoenix as, 'that lost lander' seems a bit disrespectful. The Phoenix Lander [wikipedia.org] completed its mission successfully in August of 2008. It gathered the science and data it was designed to and transmitted it back to Earth successfully. Everything that happened with the lander post 08/2008 is actually a continuation of the mission. One could make the case that the lander outperformed its design goals just like the rovers both did as it didn'

Are they trying to suggest that only about 1% of Mars is obviously interesting to Martian scientists? There's really nothing else they know they want to look at? Okay sure, the PR could be a good thing and they might get some cool suggestions, but honestly:

- Pictures of the rovers- Pictures of the canals- Pictures of the mountains- Pictures of the ice caps

Outside of that, everything is just "more red sand." Nobody really cares which small portion of the planet it is as long as they get cool desktop photos in a handy resolution (1680x1050, please). Do your own damn work and figure out what deserves to be photographed.

Oh. Well, the article doesn't say specifically what they hope to gain from user submissions, but I can guess. I'm sure the astronomers already have some subjects in mind. But the fact is that Mars is really big despite being smaller than earth, and you could probably spend your whole life looking at low-res photos of the surface identifying things you might want to take a closer look at. There's so much of the planet that we simply haven't looked at closely, that it's easy to imagine amateurs poking aro

There are already plenty of pictures of those, including even some [nasa.gov] from [nasa.gov] HiRISE [nasa.gov]. Zoom in all you like on those pictures. They are much more detailed than the MGS ones. Contrary to the interpretations of the "Enterprise Mission" guys, these structures are clearly just dunes in the bottom of canyons, as people have previously suggested. They are all over the place on Mars.

The real problem is, the Enterprise guys don't know how to interpret aerial photography and integrate it with other information very wel

I don't really get the point of this. The goal should be to map the entire surface of the planet using a system that maximizes each pass as much as possible. Crowd sourcing the poking around for interesting details is fine once you have those pictures, but people are only going to be interested in doing this for a short while. Having them work on low-res proxies for the short duration of their interest is failing to utilize their energy properly, imho.